“He went out there that night,” Brandi said to Angel, “because he loved you. He knew the furnace in the trailer was acting up, and he wanted to know you were all right. All of you. All you kids and, yes, even your mom. He wanted to make sure nothing was wrong.”
It wasn’t true — though there was at least a bit of truth in it — but Brandi convinced herself that God would forgive her this one lie, all for the sake of the future.
It was cold, and the wind was coming in gusts, and Ronnie was shivering from the thought of what he was about to do. He noticed a cardboard box on the back steps, a box of ashes.
“The wind had caught some embers,” he said, “and from time to time a shower of sparks sprayed up into the air. I didn’t care. I knew what I’d come to do, and that box of ashes didn’t mean anything to me.”
He unscrewed the cap off the gas can spout and got at it. The old upholstered chair he’d dragged out behind the trailer in the fall just before he’d found out that Della had lied to him and wasn’t taking her birth control pills was still there. He doused it with gasoline, knowing it would soak into the foam and burn hot and quick when he finally lit it. He went down the length of the trailer, slinging gas up onto the hardboard siding, pouring it along the bare ground where the roof’s overhang had kept snow from collecting. The tall grass was dry and brittle. He heard his breath and the noise the can made as it emptied, popping every once in a while as its volume decreased. He smelled the gas, and he felt the wind burning his bare ears. He didn’t have on any gloves, but it wouldn’t be until later that he’d feel the sting in his hands.
“I stopped to rest.” He looked away from the deputy and closed his eyes, playing it all out again in his head. “I still had about half of that can left. I set it down, and I put my hands on my knees. That’s when I saw it.”
A hole in the siding of the trailer, down low, just before the concrete slab. A ragged hole as big as a boot heel right where he knew the wall furnace was. A hole, he assumed, one of the goats had made at some time or the other.
“It was the most amazing thing,” he said. “Like it was a sign to me, an invitation to do something other than what I’d come to do.”
He crouched down and put his finger into the hole. It went all the way through the siding and the insulation and the drywall. He could feel the back of the furnace. It was hot when he touched it, and he knew that meant it was still running. Why, then, had Della taken the kids to her folks, as he assumed from the fact that she hadn’t answered the phone when he called?
“I got to thinking what would happen if a gust of wind came through that hole and blew out the pilot light. I wondered what it meant that right then, when I’d been determined to burn the place down, I was thinking about that pilot light. It came to me, then: Here’s a chance to do something good, and if you do this one good thing, maybe then you can do another and then another, and before long you’ll have your life back on track. That hole was my chance to save myself. I was so close, you see, to doing something I’d never be able to live down. Burn that trailer and then walk away. But now I had this chance to do something different, patch that hole. Then I’d be able to go home and think better about myself.”
That’s when he put the cap back on the gas can. He took out his pocketknife. He opened up his coat and grabbed the bottom of his T-shirt with his hand. It was his Sun Records T-shirt, the one that Brandi had found for him at the Goodwill, and yet he didn’t think about how much it pleased him, nor how much he loved Brandi. He thought only of needing something to stuff into that hole.
He pressed the point of his knife into the T-shirt, down around the bottom, just enough to make a place where he could grab the cloth and rip it. Working with his hand and the knife, he managed to tear away a strip that was sufficient for the task. He wadded it up and stuck it into the hole.
“My fingers were stiff with the cold,” he told the deputy, “and I fumbled my knife and it fell to the ground. I’d just started to feel around for it when I heard a noise. It was Shooter Rowe’s boy, Wesley, the one they call Captain. He was coming around the end of the trailer, headed for the goat pen. I stood dead still and hoped he wouldn’t see me.”
Ronnie watched Captain open the gate to the pen and step inside. The goats were bleating, and Ronnie could hear Captain moving about, his boots whisking through the loose straw on the ground. Once, he cursed. Said, “Goddamn it.” Then, after a time, he came out with one of the nannies, something tied around her neck. He was leading it with a length of something, and he had a kid up under his other arm.
“By this time, I’d gotten over behind the back steps, and I crouched down,” Ronnie said. “I was afraid for him to see me. I didn’t know what I’d say about why I was there.”
Captain went around the other side of the trailer, and Ronnie couldn’t make up his mind whether to go or stay. He wanted to go — wanted to get as far away from there as he could — but he was afraid that if he made a move, Captain would spot him. It was hard for Ronnie to tell where he was. And, too, he was curious about why Captain had come for those goats.
It wasn’t long before he was back, and he led out the other nanny. Again, he had her kid under his arm.
“I thought it was curious,” Ronnie said. “Like he’d come to steal those goats. I thought, What in the world?”
The deputy said, “So it was you and the boy out there?”
Ronnie opened his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “It was the two of us. I was just waiting to see what would happen next.”
Captain remembered what his father had said when they’d patched Della’s fence that afternoon: Sometimes it’s best to start over. Put a match to that fence.
All evening, he’d thought about that, how if that pen and shed were gone, then he and his father could build a better shed, a better pen, and then the goats wouldn’t get out. Della would have that one less thing to worry about, and Captain felt good knowing he could give her that. It was only right after she’d been so kind to him.
His plan was to lead the goats one by one across the road to his father’s barn and leave them there while he got down to work. He had a box of Diamond matches, the ones he used when he burned the trash. He knew there was straw in the shed behind the goat pen. Dry enough even on a cold night to catch and burn. The wood planks of that shed and pen were dry too. It’d be a snap. It’d all go up so quick. He knew his father was asleep in front of the television, and wouldn’t he be surprised when he found out what he’d done?
Della would be surprised too, and so would Ronnie.
When Captain slipped out of the house that night, he remembered to put on his bomber jacket, and he grabbed his sock hat and his gloves. He spotted Ronnie’s Firebird pulled off alongside the blacktop. He didn’t know what to make of that, and he really didn’t have time to think on it. He had to keep his mind on what he was going to do.